Sweet Briar professor raises and studies chain catsharks

John Morrissey leans over a glass tank and pulls out a chain catshark that he rescued from commercial fishing nets about seven years ago.

The shark wiggles in Morrissey’s hands. She’s a far cry from the formidable great white shark. As a full-grown adult, she’s about a foot and half long with gimlet eyes and sleek fins.

Morrissey, a biology professor at Sweet Briar College, is raising about 100 of these sharks in a windowless room in the Guion Science Center. He’s been studying them for four years at Sweet Briar and is determined to uncover their mysteries.

“They’re very poorly known,” said Morrissey, who attributes this to their hard-to-reach habitat on the deep sea floor.

On campus, Morrissey is known as “the shark guy” – a persona he embodies with zeal. Sharks images dominate his office in the form of posters, photographs and even a collection of beer bottle logos. Students who come to him for help or advance are greeted by the gaping jaws of great white.

On a recent afternoon in late November, wearing a Hawaiian shirt covered with fish, Morrissey explained why he loves sharks.

“Without question, I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdogs,” he said.

Morrissey views sharks as an “underdog,” not for their place on the food chain but for the bad rap they get in popular culture.

“On average, sharks kill about ten people a year and on average people kill about 100 million sharks a year. They have teeth and we have atomic weapons. There’s no contest,” he said with a smirk.

For his research, Morrissey honed in on chain catsharks due to serendipity more than anything else.

With a territory spanning from the Atlantic waters off Nova Scotia to Nicaragua, the chain catshark lives on the deep sea floor, making them difficult to study in the wild.

In recent years, commercial fishermen have cast their nets in deeper waters due to dwindling fish supplies by the coast. As a result, they’ve begun to pull up chain catsharks.

Through his connections with the fishermen, Morrissey got his hands on six live sharks for research.

At Sweet Briar, he keeps the sharks in 12 tanks under highly regulated conditions. The room must stay 65 degrees and the tank water at 50 degrees.

Morrissey and his students monitor the sharks closely, charting everything from their growth rate to eating habits. If they have a question about the shark’s behavior or anatomy, they try to answer it through meticulous research.

One student, for example, camped out by the shark tanks day and night to determine if the sharks were nocturnal, diurnal or crepuscular, meaning active at dawn and dusk. The latter prevailed, and the student gained the satisfaction of debunking Morrissey, whose hunch was the sharks were nocturnal.

Morrissey’s research currently centers on questions surrounding the shark’s reproductive strategy.

Since the sharks came to Sweet Briar in 2007, the six females that Morrissey rescued from the wild have laid two eggs per month. In that time, the females have not have any contact with male sharks, so Morrissey is working with a team of scientists to determine how and why the sharks keep laying fertilized eggs.

Morrissey lays out the possibilities: Are they storing sperm for long periods of time? Are they self-fertilizing – a rare but possible phenomena? Morrissey is waiting on the hard data to reach a solid conclusion.

“It’s a very exciting story but it takes years to answer,” Morrissey said.

In the meantime, the shark’s quick-fire egg laying habits have led to some logistical problems. With so many baby sharks, and more eggs yet to be born, Morrissey is running out of space in his 12 tanks.

“They’re eating me out of house and home,” Morrissey said, nodding to a new aquarium system he’s building.

Studying sharks is a dream job for Morrissey, who came to Sweet Briar College in 2007 after 16 years teaching biology at Hofstra University near New York City.

Ironically, for a man whose career revolves around ocean creatures, Morrissey was drawn to Sweet Briar for its rural setting. Morrissey grew up on a chicken farm in Maine, and says he prefers the country’s calm to the city’s bustle.

Morrissey was drawn to big and fearsome creatures from an early age.

“I was a dinosaur fanatic like a lot of little kids,” he said.

Growing up on a farm, however, Morrissey never thought he could make a career out of such far-flung passions.

“My parents didn’t graduate from high school and I was the first in my family to go to college. . . I didn’t know that marine biology was a job,” Morrissey said.

In college, Morrissey began to carve his path as a research scientist and switched his focus to sharks.

“I realized I rather spend my life in the Caribbean with a snorkel than in the Gobi Desert digging for fossils with a dental pick,” he joked.

In recent years, Morrissey has branched out his research to cownose rays, a close relative to the shark that is commonly found in the touch tanks of aquariums. Each spring, millions of rays migrate to Bay, where they are killed by fishermen who fear they will eat large numbers of crabs, oysters and other profitable seafood.

“I’ve seen them shot with bows and arrows and smashed with cinderblocks,” said Morrissey, who spent a summer researching at the Chesapeake.

Morrissey believes the fishermen’s fear of the rays might be unfounded. He and a team of biologists are studying the ray’s diet, which has not been well documented. So far, it appears that rays mostly far eat non-commercial items like amphipod (also known as sand fleas).

The hope is that Morrissey’s research might dissuade a grassroots effort to build a ray fishery, which would devastate the Chesapeake Bay population.

“If a fishery starts, they’ll be wiped out quickly and it’ll take decades to bounce back,” Morrissey said.

“Once again, I’m rooting for the underdog. You see the theme.”